Naughty Dog: what's next for the Santa Monica developer?

With the Uncharted developer’s latest game, The Last of Us, about to be
released, Tom Hoggins speaks to Naughty Dog’s co-presidents Evan
Wells and Christophe Balestra about the Santa Monica studio’s past, present
and future.

The Last of Us is nominated in many of the BAFTA Video Game Award categoriesPhoto: Naughty Dog/Sony

By Tom Hoggins

3:21PM BST 12 Jun 2013

From goggle-eyed cartoon characters to a brutal, post-apocalyptic dystopia, the Naughty Dog tale is one of success, progression and relevance. With Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter, the Santa Monica developer were at the vanguard of the late nineties and early naughties platform games.

Then, as the seventh generation and PlayStation 3 heralded a new wave of video game popularity and advancement, they produced Uncharted, capturing the zeitgeist of cinematic gaming with terrific narrative and bombastic action-adventure.

Now The Last of Us is the apotheosis of their blend of narrative and gameplay, brilliant, brutal and a defining moment for the generation.

To many, Naughty Dog’s rise may seem meteoric, a flash of brilliance with Uncharted in 2007 catapulting them to prominence. But this is a studio that has been creating games for nearly 30 years, and it wasn’t all such plain sailing.

Founded in Boston as Jam Software in 1986 and renamed as Naughty Dog Inc. in 1989, the studio was originally created as an independent venture by Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin. After developing a handful of games for the Apple II, Naughty Dog created the Mega Drive RPG Rings of Power and hyper-violent 3DO fighter Way of the Warrior.

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But while the development of Way of the Warrior had left the studio all but bankrupt, Universal Interactive Studios’ Mark Cerny was suitably impressed that he signed Naughty Dog to a three game deal. Way of the Warrior was poorly received on its release, but the deal had allowed Naughty Dog to relocate to LA and begin work on its next game, Crash Bandicoot.

The game helped define the character-led 3D platformer, paving the way for Naughty Dog’s steady rise. They produced two more Crash games during the PlayStation’s lifespan, and Sony were so impressed that they bought the studio in 2001. Sharp-edged cartoon action game Jak & Daxter came next, another hit in Sony’s stellar lineup for the PlayStation 2.

In 2004, after two more successful Jak & Daxter games, Gavin and Rubin decided to pass the Naughty Dog’s reins over to Evan Wells and Christophe Balestra. Wells had been with the company since 1998, while Balestra was a relatively new recruit, moving over from France to work on Jak 2 before becoming lead programmer on Jak 3.

Then came the PlayStation 3 and Uncharted. The matinee adventures of Nathan Drake cemented Naughty Dog’s position as one of the industry’s most exciting developers. It was something of a shift away from the knockabout cartoons of Crash and Jak & Daxter, bringing a strong authorial voice to cinematic bombast.

The carefully mixed blend of gameplay and narrative became their calling card, and The Last of Us looks to further that ambition. The upward curve on their work both mechanically and thematically is remarkable, but Wells insists that consistency is down to some grand plan but the team Naughty Dog have assembled, now numbering over 240.

“I don’t approach it from the standpoint that we’re trying to do anything grandiose,” he says. “We tackle each game individually, and we’ve just tried to do the best job we can.

Ultimately it’s the people we work with, the team that we’ve gathered that push each other forward. Everyone is such a perfectionist and so driven and passionate about advancing the state of the art. They want to leave their mark on the industry in some significant way.”

“I think we found our identity,” adds Balestra. “We know how we like to make games and we all agree on that. It’s going to be difficult, it’s a painful process as you have to try over and over again.

Your first attempt will never be the right one, and we know that. We are looking for people who have the same mentality and philosophy. Even if we’ve grown over the years, we’ve stayed the same in our hearts in what we like to do and how we like to do it.”

Speaking to Wells and Balestra together, there’s a definite sense of camaraderie and collaboration between the co-presidents. They often finish each other sentences, and espouse the virtues of a studio that has no boundaries.

“Every department feeds off of one another,” says Wells. “I think there’s a great deal of respect because everyone recognises it’s a team effort. The artist wouldn’t be able to create beautiful art if the programmers weren’t able to give them the tech to achieve it. If the programmers and the artists didn’t have a great game and a great narrative to attach their work to, nobody would care. Everybody understands that each part is an important component and they don’t want to let the other people down...”

“...If they step it up, they expect the others to step it up as well,” says Balestra. “It’s always back and forth across the studio. We facilitate that by making sure there’s no bureaucracy in the studio.

"If a programmer needs to talk to a texture artist about a shader, they can just go and talk to them directly, they don’t need to involve their leads or anyone else. We want people to communicate face to face and much as they can and figure out the problems together. Having very little hierarchy helps that.”

The collaborative ethos seems like a no-brainer for a medium as diverse as video games, but tales of dictatorships and publisher interference are rife. As a developer under the banner of an industry behemoth such as Sony, does their owner push to exert its influence?

“It’s kind of the opposite,” laughs Balestra. “They’re counting on us to tell them how to make games. People at Sony are extremely smart about it. We don’t have anyone from Sony in our office, it’s only Naughty Dog employees. They trust us. We work with them very closely with marketing. When you work on a project it’s important to have that relationship, but Sony would never try to interfere with us.”

“They really embrace that creative endeavour that developers thrive in,” adds Wells. “They understand that they have to support the developer and not try to impose a method of development that is foreign to that developer. So when they acquire a studio they don’t try to come in and say ‘ok so this is how we make games at Sony, and this is how you now have to make games.’ They allow the individual cultures to thrive.”

Naughty Dog’s culture, it seems, revolves around using video games to tell a story. Uncharted makes substantial effort to connect to its lead via gameplay, and The Last of Us goes even further, with action and ambient story-telling given equal billing.

“A lot of people will say you can’t let story dictate gameplay, but we don’t draw that line, sometimes it does. And vice-versa,” explains Wells. “I think when you interweave those two elements, that’s when you achieve that connection with the player, and that’s when they get invested in the characters if you honour them both equally. Sure jetpacks are cool, but if they don’t fit your story, they’re not going to make a game better.”

This ethos is demonstrated best by the fact that for both Uncharted and The Last of Us, the script-writer is also the creative director. Amy Hennig penned Uncharted while leading development, and the writer of The Last of Us, Neil Druckmann, is co-creative director with the more technically-minded Bruce Straley. It’s a distinction that shows, Naughty Dog’s commitment to narrative excellence will continue.

“I think we’re on a good path there,” says Balestra. “We’ve been developing a lot of techniques for storytelling, we’ve learned to work with actors, we have our own motion capture stage. We built one close to the office a couple of years ago. It’s definitely an investment we’ve made for the future.”

Their immediate future involves the release of The Last of Us, which is, along with Quantic Dream’s Beyond, one of Sony’s last exclusives before the shift to PlayStation 4. With the next generation so close on the horizon, is releasing a brand new IP now a risk?

“That’s been stated but I don’t necessarily believe it,” says Wells. “I think people are going to buy a game they’re interested in regardless of when it comes out. Some people are afraid of releasing outside of a holiday window, some people are afraid of releasing in the summer. Ultimately if you have a game people want to play they’re going to find a way to play it.

“I don’t think there’s any risk of it coming out at the end of a console generation at all. In fact, in a lot of ways, you’ve got the biggest install base you’re ever going to have, so it’s a great opportunity. I think the industry has just become a bit risk-averse and certainly into their sequels, and they really don’t want to make that big investment. Which it is when you open a new IP. The safer bet would be to iterate again on a franchise that is already established.

"But we certainly aren’t going to make a sequel to a game just because it’s been successful. If the team doesn’t have the passion to do another one, we’re not going to do another one. It’s not good for us, it’s not good for the fans. They’re going to see right through it if the passion wasn’t with the team that was making it.”

It’s that passion and desire that have seen Naughty Dog take their place in the upper echelons of video game development. And it’s a desire, not to stay there, but to stay true to their identity. “We just want to make the games that we want to make,” says Balestra. “We feel good about that.”